Research on political violence and human rights violations, at its best, provides a carefully delineated description and analysis of what really happened in specific cases and how such violence was experienced. To do so, it must be assured of the veracity of its sources and detail the structures of political violence in a way that deepens understanding of the extraordinarily complex legacies of violence on vulnerable communities. A number of books on Guatemala written in the 1990s have provided such depth through their nuanced ethnographic narrative, testimonial power, and analytical scope.

In Paradise in Ashes, Beatriz Manz follows in the tradition of narratives of political violence in Guatemala and recounts the tragic saga of several of the 116 settler families of the cooperative of Santa Maria Tzejá. The author begins her story with the settlement of the village by Highland Maya peasants seeking land in the 1970s and takes readers through the following two decades, showing how the villagers were able to prevail through the repression by the Guatemalan military, the travails of massacre, the flight to Mexico, and the return to rebuild the village and the lives they had left behind. The villagers’ stories are accompanied at various points by discussions of the larger political context within which their experiences took place. For the layperson, Manz’s narrative provides a general overview and, at times, moving testimonial about a very repressive period in Guatemala’s history. For those concerned with more than an overview, a number of key elements are missing in Manz’s narrative.

As the village was one of the pioneering cooperatives in the Ixcan area founded by liberation theologists in the late 1960s, one would have expected a more detailed discussion of the cooperative itself, why people joined it, and its relations to the Catholic Church and to liberation theology. Instead of a nuanced analysis, readers are told simply that villagers joined the cooperative because “they felt that the hand of God, like a miracle, had touched and guided them” (p. 77).

Because the village was a critical site for the reemergence of the guerrilla movement in the 1970s, one would have expected to find a more in-depth discussion of who the guerrillas were and how their entry into the village affected local social and cultural relations and village–army and village–guerrilla relations before, during, and after the army’s brutal massacre campaign in the early 1980s. Manz rarely provides details about the nature either of the army’s repression and its penetration of village life or of the guerrillas’ counterresponses, both of which often involved differing degrees of complicity among villagers.

Because Manz followed the cooperative through its early days, the violence, the diaspora in Mexico, and the return to Guatemala, she might also have provided a discussion of the evolution of the social and cultural dynamics of the village as the conditions within which its members found themselves changed. Little rich description is offered of life either in the village or in the refugee camps. Manz is certainly to be commended for envisioning her role as “an advocate for marginalized people” (p. 5), but compassion does not substitute for analysis, and she ignores the implications of inconvenient detail that suggest a complexity and ambivalence about the villagers’ experiences and recollections, which would have greatly enhanced readers’ understanding. Such a paucity of detail on the nature of village life and the repression in the 1970s and 1980s leads, unfortunately, to an oversimplification in describing village divisions before, during, and after the repression and in tracing how and in what ways army violence and guerrilla executions changed relations within the village.

Finally, although Manz asserts that “an engaged ethnographer should report about human rights violations in a tone that will allow events as much as possible to inform the reader” (pp. 11–12), she does not provide enough information about the villagers, the army, or the guerrillas to enable readers to make informed decisions about the material she offers in a piecemeal manner.

The lack of ethnographic precision and the absence of context for the 1970s might be explained by Manz’s admission that, because of her justifiable fears for her respondents, she either took no notes or made “undecipherable,” coded field notes during her visits in that period (p. 248). But this does not explain the lack of ethnographic detail and precision about the 1980s and 1990s, when she says she conducted taped interviews. If, at times, readers are offered quite moving testimony about villager experiences, an unexplained imprecision characterizes the interviews: we are told of a “vast” number of interviews but not how many (p. 248); we are rarely told when or where an interview took place or provided any sense of whether or how the respondent is representative of the village or of what was asked; indeed, one has no sense of the range and types of people interviewed, as no list or overall description of the respondents is provided.